Category: Favourites

  • Status & Culture: How Our Desire for Social Rank Creates Taste, Identity, Art, Fashion, and Constant Change

    W. David Marx

    I love it when a book matches the expectations set by the cover. In this case, a very intriguing “how our desire for social rank creates taste, identity, art, fashion, and constant change”. As GenX , and a marketer, I have often tried to make sense of the changing nature of culture courtesy the effects of the internet. This book is extremely insightful as it navigates what culture is, how it gets fashioned, and then, how it has changed in the last couple of decades.

    The premise is that beyond functionality and pleasures, most things we do is for status-seeking. And this sparks creativity, which in turn, creates culture. David Marx uses a bunch of sciences, including anthropology, neuroscience, economics, philosophy and meshes them with art history, and media studies to answer why things become popular, why that changes over time, and how it shapes our identity and our behaviour.

    The book is divided into four parts, beginning with understanding status, conventions, signalling, and how this relates to taste, authenticity and identity. It then delves into classes and sensibilities, subcultures and countercultures, how status-seeking feeds creativity, and fuels culture, and its changes. Further, it uses fashion cycles as a means to understand how cultural changes happen, and the role of mass media in it. This section also studies the part that history plays in shaping culture, and how frequent blasts of ‘retro’ are inevitable. All of this puts us in a great place to understand what the internet age has done to culture, and some direction on what is ahead.

    I found the book engaging and accessible, and very useful in understanding my own behaviour and ‘tastes’, as well as that of people I know, and society at large. Highly recommended.

    Notes
    1. The Beatles mop top haircut’s origin story is Stu Sutcliffe’s (the original bass guitarist of the Beatles) German girlfriend trying to imitate the French mode, which was becoming popular among the local art boys. After their reluctant conversion, it became their signature, and a global trend!
    2. Status denotes a specific position in the social hierarchy. Every status comes with specific rights and duties, the most desirable benefits coming to those at the top (more attention and rewards, deference, access to scarce resources, dominance – make others do things against their wishes). Status is bestowed by others, it is social. Status is contextual – local, global. And it is zero-sum, when one gains, someone else has to lose.
    3. Achievements get embodied in particular forms of capital – political, educational, economic, social. This capital determines our memberships in different groups.
    4. Different status levels have different conventions. At first conventions of social interactions regulate behaviour at a conscious level, then we internalise them and they become habits. And then they set our perceptual framework for observing the world, and our expectations. Our sense of meaning and order. Lifestyle is thus a requirement of social rank and an expression of it.
    5. Just as we internalise conventions, status value acts on our brains at a subconscious level. Conventions with high status value appear to us as beautiful, and vice versa. But we attribute this liking to other things like practicality, cost, sentimental value or just personal preferences. (vacations)
    6. The moral duty of self actualisation is a status duty – individuals at the top of the hierarchy must pursue unique behaviours and distinctive choices.
    7. Status symbols are a signal that allow a quick reading of and by others. But they offer alibis (quality, aesthetic features etc) so it is not just a symbol.
    8. There are five signalling costs – money, time (PhD), exclusive access, cultural capital (knowledge of conventions by spending time among high status), norm breaking
    9. Taste, as reflected by multiple signals, is how status appraisals happen. To have good taste means making better choices than others.
    10. Lifestyle choices must reveal congruence – an internal consistency with the target sensibility. Deep knowledge opens the door to better taste, and congruence reveals our commitment to high status sensibility. The highest status people make distinctive choices through bounded originality.
    11. In signalling, we build personas – observable packages of signals, taste, sensibility, immutable characters and cues absorbed from our upbringing and background. Others use this persona to determine our identity. And we have a ‘self’, known only to us.
    12. Our ‘cultural DNA’ = hidden elements, immutable characters and cues, conventions for normal status, emulations (of higher status) and individual distinctions
    13. iPod won as a status symbol, though Microsoft Zune had better features
    14. Old Money taste focuses on patina, visual proof of age in their possessions (vintage) They uses this as an advantage over New Money.
    15. The professional class (70s onward) built a balance of economic, social and cultural capital. Impressing old money and embarrassing new money’s ‘loud’ tastes
    16. New Money’s use of economic capital in signalling spurs the creation of expensive luxury goods – sports cars, summer homes, designer clothes etc. Old Money’s countersignalling and focus on patina and cultural capital get companies to make classic, modest goods with functional appeal. The professional class’s signalling through information creates a market for middlebrow/consumer media guides, functional goods, artisanal goods, and copies of Old Money lifestyles. Underprivileged individuals’ desire to be part of culture outdo peers pushes companies to offer kitsch and flashy entry-level consumer goods.
    17. Immanuel Kant a sorted 3 authoritative criteria for artistic genius – the creation of fiercely original works, which over time become imitated as exemplars, and are created through mysterious and seemingly inimitable methods.
    18. Individuals make adoption decisions within the framework of human interaction. They consider how when and from whom they receive information, how they view uncertainty about switching and how they will be judged in the community for making the switch This creates five distinct groups, innovators, early adopters, early majority, let majority and laggards. The diffusion process – high status adoption of new convention for distinction, early adopters’ embrace of that convention as emulation of their status superiors, early majority reinvention and simplification to follow an emerging social norm, late majority imitation to avoid losing normal status , laggards’ passive adoption without intention
    19. Elite flock to three particular categories of items that fulfil their needs. Rarities, novelties and technology innovations.
    20. Four related phenomena, in the internet age – the explosion of content, the clash of maximalist and minimalist sensibilities accompanying the rising global wealth, the rejection of taste as a legitimate means of distinction, the over evaluation of the past in Gen X’s retromania and the abandoning of the past in Gen Z’s Neomania.
    21. “You can’t just walk around and be visible on the internet for anyone to see you. You have to act and the main purpose of this communication is to make yourself look good.” Social media also enables us to quantify our status like never before in like retreats comments and followers.
    22. Before the internet, elites could protect their status symbols behind information barriers and exclusive access to products. The internet broke that.
    23. Another elite group has stepped in to countersignal gauche extravagance, the professional class tech billionaires who are forming their own taste culture. They created wealth without shedding their professional class habitus. Skeptic of glamour and respect for thoughtful thrift, they make their choices based on functional rationales rather than the open pursuit of status symbols.
    24. Omnivorism (consume and like everything) has had major effects on culture over the last few decades. In the past taste worked as a decision classifier by drawing clear lines between social groups. Omnivorism drains this power by declaring nearly everything suitable for consumption.
    25. Collectively reaching the stage of meta knowledge we come to understand the arbitrariness of our own preferences taste and culture. The proclaimed superiority of preferred styles over others is accordingly and arrogant and bigoted act.
    26. Omnivore tastes then can be used to dismantle the status structures that prevent the equitable distribution of respect. In a world of celebrity wealth-gospel, and millennial financial anxiety, young entertainers face little backlash for aggressively courting likes, subscribers and advertisers. Follower counts and gross earning appear to be the only relevant sign of cultural import.
    27. Youth find ‘self expression by enlisting in a global army (e.g. BTS)
    28. Hysteresis – the lingering values of a previous age continuing to guide our judgments

    Status & Culture

  • The Coincidence Plot

    Anil Menon

    Not often in the fiction genre does one find a novel that is challenging and entertaining. The fact that I did not buy this book (D did) is a coincidence that does seem very meta. I absolutely loved The Coincidence Plot – its explorations of philosophy, the layering of its plots and characters, and the fantastic conversations that they have with each other, and sometimes, themselves.

    The book is a wandering of sorts, centred around coincidences and the kind of God that exists in such a world. If that smells like Spinoza, it’s not a coincidence. The plots, subplots, and characters are all built around this theme. Starting with Artur, a mathematician escaping Nazi Germany and working on Spinoza’s thesis after his work on the uncertainty of mathematical proofs remains unfinished, to two characters working on novels to bring to existence this mathematician’s life and thoughts – “ontological proof for the existence of God”. In case I made it out to be a mind-numbing philosophy grind, it isn’t. The characters and interesting, and well-written, and so are their relationships.

    It’s definitely not the standard linear book. Each chapter has two characters from a finite set, but placed across different geographical settings and time periods. As we go along, the parallels are unmistakeable, and that is not a coincidence. Anil Menon seems to know a bunch of things about a bunch of things. It allows him to create layers and depths, and when you combine that with the twin powers of a fantastic sense of humour, and a poignant sensitivity and empathy towards grief and the human condition in general, it creates a marvel. Sometimes preposterous, sometimes profound, this has been one of my favourite fiction reads in a while!

    This is in my Bibliofiles 2023 long list.

  • The Master and His Emissary: The Divided Brain and the Making of the Western World

    Iain McGilchrist

    As is the case most of the time these days, I discovered The Master and His Emissary thanks to a podcast. Iain McGilchrist’s concepts seemed extremely intriguing, and now I have to admit (as he mentions early in the book) maybe intuitively consistent with my lived experience, and I had to read the book soon. Turns out that it goes directly to my all-time favourites, and was in my Bibliofiles 2023 list.

    As the subtitle suggests, the book is divided into two parts – the divided brain, and the making of the Western World, each with half a dozen chapters. The first part deals with the brain itself – the asymmetry of the right and left hemispheres, their collective and individual roles, how their functioning actually leads to different perspectives, how this affected the evolution of music and then language (which can be seen as a key component in the progression of the species), the primacy of the right hemisphere, and how its emissary – the left hemisphere – has now usurped control.

    The heuristic ways of looking at the hemispheres, e.g. left analytical, right creative etc, is replaced by a nuanced view. The differences between them are less about what they do and more about how they approach something. The left’s utilitarian ability to ‘grasp’ (look at how the metaphor applies to thoughts), its ability to provide simple answers and articulate them well, have all enabled it to grab control at an accelerated pace since the Industrial Revolution, and create a world where it prizes precisely these capabilities in individuals, institutions, and culture at large.

    This is in many ways opposed to the right, which takes more holistic views, understands ideas and metaphors, perceives emotions better, specialises in non-verbal communication, and is humble about what it knows. The right deals with whatever is implicit, the left is tied to more explicit and more conscious processing. The right is present and pays attention to the world outside, the left re-presents. We need both hemispheres, and the right knows it, but the left thinks it knows everything. The left creates a world, and when it stops communications with the right, will not even accept reality if it counters the ‘truth’ of the world it has created. Its role was to provide a map of reality, it now thinks the map is reality, and if not, it will remake reality to fit the map.

    The second part then digs into how this has manifested in the world around. It begins with the concept of mimesis (my favourite part) and how it was the crux of our leap into what we now call culture. The meta-skill that enables all other skills – imitation – possibly explains the rapid expansion of the brain in early hominids. Through the next five chapters, Iain takes us through history – from the early Greeks to the post-modern world, and how, though history has seen a see-saw in terms of the dominance of the hemispheres – Renaissance, Reformation, Enlightenment, Romanticism, and the Industrial Revolution – the impact of the last one was such that we are now in a world where a swing towards the right seems near impossible. Much like an addict, who is not even conscious that his next dose is not just another dose. ‘There is a vicious cycle between feelings of boredom, emptiness and restlessness, on the one hand, and gross stimulation and sensationalism on the other’.

    The research is deep, in both sections, as evidenced by over a hundred pages of notes and bibliography. I especially appreciated the decision of not having same-page notes – it really does help the flow of reading. Iain has painstakingly tried to make a large number of diverse topics as accessible as possible. The first half is based on conclusions from scientific research and experiments across history, and various domains. The second half is itself an accordion of topics across centuries – arts, music, politics, language, and everything we call culture.

    I think my bias for this book and its argument is based on my own experience. As a person and a professional who has to balance both hemispheres, I have been pulled to the left for the longest while. And in many workshops, the recommendation to me has been to let my right side ‘play’. It is only very recently that I have been able to start doing that, and I have to say that I am much happier. The Master and His Emissaryis a book I hugely recommend. It is not the easiest of reads, and I deliberately slowed down my reading speed so as to not gloss over it (though I still did in some of the arts discussions!) but it will open up how you think – the narrative you have made about yourself, and the world around you.

    Quotes and ideas from The Master and His Emissary
    There are four main pathways to truth – science, reason, intuition, and imagination
    “The question is not what you look at, but what you see” ~ Henry Thoreau
    Attention changes what kind of thing comes into being for us : in that way it changes the world. Whether they are humans (say, employer vs friend) or things – a mountain is landmark to a navigator, a source of wealth to the prospector, and a dwelling place of gods for another. There is no ‘real’ mountain which can be distinguished from these, no one way of thinking which reveals the true mountain.
    Manipulospatial abilities may have provided the basis for primitive language. Function gestures become manipulative, syntax developed to form language, expression of our will. (p 111) Even in left handers, grasping actions controlled by left hemisphere, thus right hand.
    Language’s origin in music. Language originates as an embodied expression of emotion, that is communicated by one individual ‘inhabiting’ the emotional world of the other. A process that could have been derived from music. Grooming – music – language, all picked up by imitation. (p 123)
    Adam Zeman’s three principal meanings of consciousness – as a waking state, as experience, as mind (p 187)
    The river is not only passing across the landscape, but entering into it and changing it too, as the landscape has ‘changed’ and yet not changed the water. The landscape cannot make the river. It does not try to put a river together. It does not even say ‘yes’ to the river. It merely says ‘no’ to the water – or does not say ‘no’ to the water, whatever that it is that it does so, it allows the river to come into being. The river does not exist before the encounter. Only water exists before the encounter, and the river actually comes into benign the process of encountering the landscape, with its power to say ‘no’ or not to say ‘no’.
    The idea that the ‘separation’ of the two hemispheres took place in Homeric Greece. (voices of gods) (p260 -275)
    Gnothi seauton – know thyself
    In sooth I know not why I am so sad,
    It wearies me, you say it wearies you;
    But how I caught it, found it, or came by it,
    What stuff ’tis made of, whereof it is born,
    I am to learn.
    ~ Shakespeare, The Merchant of Venice
    The difference between reason and rationality. The former depends on seeing in things in context – right hemisphere. Latter is left, context-independent.
    Kant described marriage as an agreement between two people as to the ‘reciprocal use of each others’ sexual organs’
    ‘Life is a progress from want to want, not from enjoyment to enjoyment’ ~ Sam Johnson
    Modern consumers everywhere are in a ‘permanent state of unfulfilled desire’
    Certainty is the greatest of all illusions: whatever kind of a fundamentalism it may underwrite, that of religion or of science, it is what the ancients meant by hubris.

    The Master and His Emissary

  • From Strength to Strength

    Arthur C. Brooks

    Quite a few of Arthur C. Brooks’ columns have resonated with me and also been thought-starters for some of my blog posts, so I was looking forward to ‘From Strength to Strength’. The premise is that in the first half of their lives, (most) people single-mindedly strive to be successful, often at the cost of health, relationships etc. But with age, many of the abilities that made them successful start to decline. They resent and resist this, leading to frustration and dissatisfaction. The book is about navigating the second half of one’s life when there are changes in mind and body, and the rules by which one worked and lived no longer seem to make sense. How does one get through this liminality, and thrive?

    The book begins with one of his articles I had particularly liked – Your Professional Decline is Coming. I found this chapter very interesting thanks to the concepts that appear in it. For instance, “the principle of psychoprofessional gravitation”, the idea that the agony of decline is directly related to prestige previously achieved, and to one’s emotional attachment to that prestige. Also, the two kinds of intelligence – fluid intelligence, defined as the ability to reason, think flexibly, and solve novel problems, and crystallised intelligence, the ability to use a stock of knowledge learned in the past. The former is high in early adulthood, and starts to diminish in the thirties and forties. The latter starts growing from then on. Simplistically put, intelligence, and wisdom. The trick is to jump off from the first curve and on to the second in the later stages of life.

    The book then moves on to how we objectify ourselves at work, and are addicted to the success it brings, making the jump to the second curve difficult. Many things are involved – pride, fear, social comparison, and a loss aversion that focuses on well, losing things like wealth, power, and fame one has amassed through hard work.

    The rest of the book offers perspectives on how to get off the treadmill – mindfulness, finding friends and meaningful relationships, focusing on companionate love in marriage (rather than passionate love), facing one’s fear of death, distinguishing between intrinsic and extrinsic goals and focusing on the former, starting vanaprastha and understanding how to detach, finding a faith. I found this part not entirely different from things I have read in other books. I think I expected a bit more, but on hindsight, that’s an unfair expectation, since this is something one has to figure out independently, books and other people can only offer perspectives.

    Having said that, ‘From Strength to Strength’ is a great start if you’re feeling the waves of midlife hit you. It provides context and perspectives to help you start framing the second half of life.

    Notes
    Fear of death: “thanatophobia.”Whether paralyzing or mild, the fear of death has eight distinct dimensions: fear of being destroyed, fear of the dying process, fear of the dead, fear for significant others, fear of the unknown, fear of conscious death, fear for body after death. and fear of premature death.
    Edsel problem: The famous car that Ford executives loved, but consumers hated. They sell what *they* like, instead of what the consumers wants and needs. (in the context of helping people at our convenience and in our way)
    “The worst thing about death is the fact that when a man is dead it is impossible any longer to undo the harm you have done him, or to do the good you haven’t done him.They say: live in such a way as to be always ready to die. I would say: live in such a way that anyone can die without you having anything to regret.” Leo Tolstoy

    From Strength to Strength

  • God, Human, Animal, Machine: Technology, Metaphor, and the Search for Meaning

    Meghan O’Gieblyn

    It is difficult to slot God, Human, Animal, Machine: Technology, Metaphor, and the Search for Meaning. Meghan O’Gieblyn sets us off on a thought-provoking exploration of the intersection of faith, technology, and the human experience, and traverses many interesting paths to understand what makes us human, and our search for meaning. Descartes started us on the path to the Enlightenment by ‘separating’ the material world and our ‘soul. From then, we took pride in using scientific temperament and technology to systematically solve nature’s puzzles. And now, when the same toolkit has created machines whose learning and thinking models are increasingly ‘black boxes’, there is fear, uncertainty and probably a bit of ego.

    Through chapters that are at once seamless and disparate, she navigates philosophy, technology, and theology and our different ways of understanding God, ourselves, and the world we are creating through technology. The metaphors of our time are built around technology, and AI and tech are raising questions that have for long been asked by philosophers – free will, immortality, the relationship between mind and body. Science by definition requires an objective perspective, and consciousness can only be felt, and measured inside. I can never know what it feels like to be another person. While there are many hypotheses, this is an area which science has been unable to really crack.

    In ‘Pattern’ it is interesting to see the many parallels between the Bible and the belief systems of technologists, despite many of the latter being atheists. Transcendence through the Singularity and trans-humanism, just as through the Book of Revelation, the resurrection and rapture, for instance. I really liked Kurzweil’s idea of consciousness as a pattern of information that persists over time. Essentially like a stream that rushes past the rocks in its path. The actual molecules of water change, but the stream remains the ‘same’. In a letter to the author, he shares a wonderful insight that “the difference between so-called atheists and people who believe in ‘God’ is a matter of the choice of metaphor, and we could not get through our lives without having to choose metaphors for transcendent questions.” From (divine) clockmakers to computers.

    In the chapter ‘Network’, the idea of emergence is discussed in the context of consciousness, and so is the work of many scientists to recreate that – experimenting with robots to see if they evolve complex behaviour from simple rules. It hasn’t really worked thus far, but I did wonder about the amount of time evolution took to ‘produce’ us.

    In ‘Paradox’, there is mention of the parallels between quantum mechanics and eastern mysticism, and the idea of us being in a simulation, and/or a multiverse. It is interesting to note that all paths require a reasonable dose of faith! There is a very intriguing part that uses video games to illustrate how the first-person view makes it look like a world that is always complete as things appear when you move. But were they around when the player was not looking? Does the world “only render that which is being observed”?

    ‘Metonymy’ moves into materialism (science and its ability to reduce everything to causal mechanisms), dualism (mind-body), panpsychism (all things have a mind-like quality) and finally idealism (the physical world is wholly constituted by consciousness). The mind serving as a microcosm of the world’s macroscopic consciousness reminded me of Aham Brahmasmi. Towards the end of this chapter, she quotes Hannah Arendt, who wrote about scientists who believed that computers can do what a human brain cannot comprehend.

    That paves the way for ‘Algorithm’, which begins with Chris Anderson’s 2008 view that data deluge has made our scientific method obsolete. It has now gotten to a state where we will accept the algorithm’s perspective probably more than our own mind’s! But as Nick Bostrom has pointed out, there is no reason for a super intelligence to share our values including benevolent concern for others. The algorithm does not necessarily worry about downstream consequences or collateral damage. And yet, even as algorithms are plagued by errors and the biases we have fed it, ‘dataism’, as Yuval Noah Harari states, is the new ideology. That if we have enough data, we can know everything, thereby increasing surveillance and tracking.

    The end of this chapter has a chilling, and yet fascinating observation – “What we are abdicating, in the end, is our duty to create meaning from our empirical observations — to define for ourselves what constitutes justice, and morality, and quality of life — a task we forfeit each time we forget that meaning is an implicitly human category that cannot be reduced to quantification. To forget this truth is to use our tools to thwart our own interests, to build machines in our image that do nothing but dehumanize us.”
    In ‘Virality’, the final chapter, she discusses how in the digital domain, quantitative measures of success like clicks and likes have overtaken the virtue or validity of the content. There is also the funny (and yet quite true) part of how, when we treat Trump as an algorithm which has mastered social media, it all makes sense!

    God Human Animal Machine is intensely thought-provoking, and O’Gieblyn manages to balance curiosity and a healthy skepticism, distilling thoughts from various streams and thinkers, to provide a coherent narrative that fuels more thinking. For all of this, the book is also deeply personal and extremely accessible. Highly recommended.

    God Human Animal Machine
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